A Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft

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A Deed Without a Name

Darkness adopted illumination in order to make itself visible.

-Robert Fludd

We all know stories about witchcraft; some of us even think we know the ‘truth’ about it. What we often forget is that whilst there is an ancient and eternal ‘deed without a name’ that lies behind the word, the word itself is little more than a site where numerous tales cluster. Those who choose the path, or are chosen for the path, of witchcraft usually have a gut-level sense of what the word means. They are drawn inexorably to a collection of images, a vague narrative which has to do with night-flights in spirit form, the crossing of hedges and boundaries, boiling cauldrons and wild dances in wild places where the dead appear, and where animal transformation and acts of sorcery occur.

The scholarly among us may ask questions about how much of the image of the witch was created by the interrogator? Others are happy to accept the received knowledge as it stands. Those who consult scholarship too often err on the side of the arm-chair occultist, reading tomes upon tomes of books and journal articles, practicing ‘witchcraft in the head’ without finding a way to bridge the gap between scholarship and practice. Others do not keep track of the sizeable advances in modern witchcraft scholarship and thus miss out on much enlightening material. This book attempts to bridge the gap between these extremes.

It aims to shine the light of reason into the darkness of the wild and waste places outside the hedge. But unlike those who usually carry the lantern of scholarship I am an experienced practical occultist and witch. I do not go there to look into the shadows as someone to whom darkness is foreign and who wishes to tame it with my intellect through ordering and categorising. I know the darkness as a Mother, and the darkness Herself knows me as one of Her own. I take this light of reason with me to illuminate for others something that I myself am familiar with, and because this light, or ‘fire’, is also part of my inheritance as a human being.

Whilst I have become comfortable in those gloaming spaces I know that we moderns are not able to fully return to primal darkness on its own terms. As Fate has it, we are bearers of the flame of civilisation and find ourselves a long way from the mindset of the witches of old, who met spirits at styles and crossroads with seeming ease. And yet what I discover through kindling up my flame and taking it into unexpected places, is that we are also never far from those shadows; they nestle in the base of our skulls and in our guts, as well as in the woodland outside the hedge, part of our inheritance also. So this work is dedicated to a pursuit of the half forgotten legacy of witchcraft and the myth of witchcraft, one that pays homage both to the lantern of the seeking mind and the rich, fecund darkness from which that mind draws its life. In seeking the ‘legacy’ of an essentially nameless act I will be forced to tell stories and repeat stories, as tales, because shared narratives are what we are really talking about when we talk about ‘traditions’.

For many decades witchcraft trial records were seen as largely fictional narratives that therefore had little value in understanding the real ‘truth’ behind these confessions. They were viewed in terms of the power of the inquisitor over the victim and seldom in the context of the wider belief system of European folklore. Scholars were too afraid of being accused of ‘Murrayism’; that is the belief, along with the early scholar Margaret Murray (so influential upon Wicca) that the trial records represent proof of a ‘witch cult’ replete with covens of thirteen run by literal priests in devil’s costumes.

Whilst Murray’s thesis has been largely discredited other scholars have reopened this field as a viable area of study. Carlos Ginzburg began the important work of showing the witches’ ‘flight’ as a shamanic-style leaving of the body by a ‘Double’, rather than a literal and therefore impossible story. Since then we have been inclined to look at the multiple witchcraft narratives differently. Many scholars have begun to look at them in terms of ‘things believed to be true’ by people, regardless of their truth value as ‘literal facts’ and others have gone further and made comparisons with shamanism in other nations. It is my aim to make the practical implications of this witchcraft scholarship available through the lens of my own occult experience, namely in Traditional Witchcraft.

This project, and the book it became, is the result of a rather fey coincidence. Over the years as I collected the experiences of myself and my contemporaries I often discovered, after the fact, that this experiential material could now be supported or even better explained by scholarly material on the topic. On its own a vision, a swirling form out of the body of the darkness, that wells into the mind of a single person may be seen as an anomaly. But when those forms begin to create patterns and repetitions the attention of the light of reason is warranted. I decided that it was high time for someone to attempt a synthesis between this wealth of scholarly information and this continuingly growing practical knowledge-base, one that would have value for the practical student of non-wiccan, post-Christian, European witchcraft.

The implications of the works of such scholars as Carlos Ginzburg[1], Eva Pocs[2], Claude Lecouteux[3] and most notably and recently, Emma Wilby, all provided me with elements of the material here. Juxtaposed both with my practical experience in current witchcraft and a wealth of folkloric material I am able to put this scholarly progress in a context that is useful for those who wish to practice rather than simply read about witchcraft. But I have done so in a way that goes beyond the typical ‘recipe book of spells’ model, and tries to cut deeper into the marrow of what this legacy really is and means.

Emma Wilby’s work ‘ The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth Century Scotland ’[4] in particular poses large and weighty questions about the practice of Witchcraft, for those who are engaged in it. Her comparative work between witches like Isobel Gowdie and the ‘dark shamans’ of the Amazon Basin is extremely compelling and forces us to ask perhaps the most important questions of all about ‘witchcraft.’ What is a witch? And what deeper function did witches originally fulfil, not just for their community but also for the unseen world of the spirit?

Wilby shows how Isobel and her coven acted essentially as ‘Fates’ that often dealt malignant blows upon mankind, that when Isobel is called ‘witch’ it means something entirely different to when the ‘faerie witch’ Bessie Dunlop is named ‘witch’. Unlike Isobel, Bessie’s contact with the world of faerie led her to offer cures and healing to sick children, adults and animals. This being said, the sum of the evidence suggests that these services offered by some witches were only the tip of the ice burg in terms of the deeper meaning of witchcraft at a cosmological level.

One might be tempted to simply correct this sloppy use of terminology by giving Isobel the appellation ‘black witch’ and Bessie: ‘white witch.’ But the matter is not so simple. A quick glance at the work of Carlos Ginzburg on the benandanti and his comparative work on Werewolves (a topic also covered in detail by Eva Pocs) shows us that the Otherworldly experiences placed under the heading of ‘witchcraft’ were far more diverse than can be simply ordered into ‘black’ and ‘white’ versions of the same phenomena. Now of course, much of this diversity is drawn from continental sources, but I believe there is evidence enough to suggest that this diversity would have once been more general in Britain as well as the continent. The Sicilian ‘faerie trials’ as they were called, where dozens of women and a few men were accused of being ‘faerie-magicians’, consorting with the King and Queen of faerie and deriving powers to heal from there, are strikingly similar to the ‘faerie-doctors’ of Ireland and to Bessie Dunlop of Scotland. Isobel Gowdie makes us think more of the ‘ malandanti ’, with her cursing and blighting behaviour, than the benandanti (good walkers) who fought against them for the preservation of the crops! It is suggested here that it is both useful to continue calling ourselves ‘witches’ and at the same time that we will discover there to be many kinds of ‘witches’.

The ‘deed without a name’, mankind’s innate ability to have contact with another world and participate, often ecstatically, in its doings, (something more pronounced in some than others), came to find a name in Europe under the word ‘witchcraft.’ It would be easy for the scholarly among us to dislike the term or even reject it. Indeed, in a sense, by spreading a blanket over all spiritual experiences that were Other and calling them ‘witchcraft’ the witch-hunter did us a great disservice and lost or obscured a lot of rich and divergent forms of sorcery and ecstatic experience. But in another sense, a sense of turning the ‘devil of perversity’ upon itself, it also opens up the possibility of a brotherhood of the Other. And it is in this spirit that I approach the term.

Through a careful mix of scholarship and experience there is no reason we cannot also claim back some of the variety behind the term today, and enjoy both the unity and the diversity. For it is unlikely that these many powers that erupted into the psyche of Europe in the past have utterly ceased to do so, or ceased to manifest in diverse forms because we have all but ceased to recognise them. And through reawakening this understanding I believe that as an Art we can move closer to less of a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the unseen. Once we did not all ride broomsticks, but some of us rode on ragwort, stangs or pitchforks, fennel, sorghum, goats, wolves, cats or required no stead because we simply transformed into beasts ourselves. And yet, at the same time, we needn’t deny the broomstick as a symbol that has come to unite us. For really the symbolism of the broom goes a little deeper than just habit or stereotype.

It is noted that witches were inclined to fly on brooms, stangs, pitchforks, distaffs and even ladles which can initially seem a little strange. But when we realise that in Hungary, for instance, when the drum became something that could no longer be owned for fear of being caught using it to go into a trance state, it gradually became replaced by the sieve, a common household object that could be pressed into the service of the unseen.[5] These common household objects are a testimony to how the world outside the hedge continually interpenetrates with everything inside it, everything mundane and seemingly normal and unthreatening remains subtly imbued with its Other. In a world where ‘witchcraft’, a practice always partially hidden, became something that had to hide, it was able to hide, behind every teapot, ladle, broom and kettle on the stovetop.

Who is Called and Who is Calling?

…Queen of our inner country, that landscape which is usually called the Soul. She knows its highways and turnings, its valleys and its peaks. Her language is poetry and where she walks dreams spring up behind her like small white flowers.

-Edward Whitmont

There is a key question when it comes to witchcraft, and yet it is too often skipped right over. We talk about being here, or walking down the ‘crooked path’ because of a call, and too often neglect to ask ‘who is calling’? And where does this ‘crooked path’ lead?

The very term ‘the crooked path’ suggests at first glance that the path of witchcraft is the opposite path to that of Christianity. The term is in fact related to the tradition of ‘sacred walking’, of walking for meditative purposes by early Celtic Christians on pilgrimage. These tracks were laid out to connect sites of holy significance and being on the ‘straight and narrow path’ symbolised the meditative walkers adherence to God.[6] As an old Gaelic maxim tells us, ‘He who will not take advice will take the crooked track.’

But like with many seemingly ‘Christian reversals’ that have found their way into the witchcraft legacy there is more to this notion of the ‘crooked path’ than simply doing the opposite to the church. Like Hermes’ Caduceus the ‘straight tracks’ around Britain (and other locations) and the human spine itself, the straight path is always coiled around by twin serpent lines. In the case of these twining ‘serpent lines’ in the land numerous ancient pagan holy sites emerge along them. It seems that our ancestors set out these holy sites both to recognise the straight track down the middle and the crooked one that twined around it. Like the migratory path of geese, something often associated with the host of the dead in flight along the ‘ghost tracks’; these straight tracks are best appreciated from the air. The ‘crooked’ snaking paths around them however are very much the path of the walker, they penetrate the land with many a holy well and standing stone.

So we might say that in reviling the serpent, in reviling this crooked and snaking path, it was walking the path of the earth and its interior that the Christian saints were rejecting. It also implies that if we agree to walk this path we accept the ‘hooks and crooks’ of the road that may obscure what lies ahead and agree to follow the irregularities of the earth’s path and be guided by our intuition. We could even say that in the context of this book, itself an exercise in meditative walking, that the scholarly component of witchcraft lore is the ‘straight track’ and the path of experiential gnosis via occult practice is the ‘crooked road’ that winds and snakes around it.

If this is the path that someone walks in becoming a witch then how does someone know they have been called to become a witch, and what makes someone a witch? It seems that from the available records there were two broad scenarios that occurred in the past. The first scenario is that the individual is in some sense